Author's Notes. For ifimightchime.

Disclaimer. I fuckin' wish.

A few days after Will Graham is sent to the BSHCI, there's the sound of knocking on Beverly's apartment door. Wresting herself from her soft sheets and fuzzy blanket (a gift from her mother and a holdover from university, respectively), she throws on a t-shirt and pants over her boxer briefs before going to the door.

There's a moment between looking through the peephole and wrenching the door open where she's shock-still like a cut-out in a CD recording, whispering oh my god, because on the other side is Abigail Hobbs.

She looks alive. Well-fed. Missing an ear, yes, but even healthy-looking if Beverly ignored the pale surprise on her face. She looks like she wants to say something, and Beverly wants to do the same, but first she has to be certain this is real, that there's been another girl from the dead.

She reaches out to Abigail – slow enough so she can see and move away if she wants, a small tap on the shoulder, just like Dad always did – and Abigail breaks apart into dust, outlined in the morning light.

That day, she's left to do the rest of the fiber work on Dr. Lecter's copious creatively colored suits. Seeing him work in the field had been an almost uncanny experience. It was the serene surety of his insight into the killer's aims (their design if she wanted to step close to sentiment), his ability to divine their whims beyond probability. You're the new Will Graham, indeed – only with none of the shaking.

There had been several occasions where she had thought to call Dr. Lecter to ask about Will's condition.

With those thoughts comes Abigail Hobbs. She'd only talked to the girl once or twice, and she knew Will had an obligation to her, but that was it. Mostly, she'd felt bad. Having a shitty 'father' was always difficult, never mind one that was also cannibal.

...What to even say about the events of the morning, really. That she was so desperate to believe her friend wasn't a murderer as to imagine a dead girl outside her door? It's a unique temptation to give into her personal bias, she guesses. The thing is, bias warps judgement – that's a hard lesson learned in the BAU. (There was no trace evidence on Will at the scene of Dr. Sutcliffe's murder.)

There is no trace evidence on Dr. Lecter's belongings.

At least the donut she grabs from the Starbucks she sometimes visits after work tastes good. Sweet from the glaze, right between running and crusted. There's a light up in the left corner that flickers on and off sometimes – it hadn't the last time she'd been here. Underneath her sole are a few packets of sugar, one blue and one yellow. Someone in line has just bumped into the roundabout display, the girl at the register is brown-haired, with a plain but pretty face – and trace evidence of the murder was later found in Will's house.

Absent in scene. Present in house. Not hard to explain: fore-planning, the skill of any intelligent psychopath. And said intelligent psychopath turned himself in. (Intelligent psychopath with encephalitis. Wasn't lying about that.)

(Intelligent psychopath with encephalitis that his psychiatrist didn't catch. Dr. Bloom did.) Abigail's ear down his throat, fingernail scrapings, fishing lures, "It was Hannibal," Dr. Lecter's clothes are clean, trace evidence doesn't lie.

Ugh.

The drive home, she grips the wheel, arms near-locked, and keeps her eyes straight on the road, like her mother always told.

Abigail Hobbs is back from the dead a second time when Beverly enters her apartment, considering whether or not to eat cereal for dinner.

This time, she's sat at Beverly's kitchen table, legs crossed. This time, Beverly shuts the door, tosses her bag onto the sofa, and waits.

"I guess we both know touching's a bad idea," Abigail says, with an expression almost resembling a smile.

"I figured as much, after this morning."

Her apartment fan whirs, in the background. She sighs. Sits down at the table, too.

"I feel stupid for even asking this, but you're not a ghost, are you? A hallucination?"

"...I'm not sure what I am. But I'm not dead. If I'm a hallucination, then you are too. Folie à deux," she says, and laughs.

"Will Graham threw up your ear, Abigail. Your blood was all over the scene."

Abigail shrugs. "Hannibal cut it off. He drained my blood, too. So I'd die to the world. He had… plans, for us."

Getting an ear down a throat: difficult, but not impossible. Not with surgical expertise.

"It's hard to believe you're not a hallucination, Will's been pointing fingers at Lecter, too. You let him fake your death?"

Maybe she should've fixed cereal before getting into this. Abigail's just looking at the table, twisting her fingers. Eventually she says, "He was the man on the phone."

Abigail swallows, inhales, before telling Beverly about talking to Sarah Olsen.

Laurel Sorenson. Diana Latimer. Priscilla Cohen. Renae Winn. Alex Anderson. Deena Woodward. Elise Nichols.

She asks Abigail about Nicholas Boyle. She'd examined his body, seen the way the cut weaved. She's not going to go to Jack about it. She's worked with the man long enough to know what will happen if she does.

"– And that's if I believe you are real, Abigail. But I get being stuck in a hard position because of your dad, that's understandable. Killing Nicholas Boyle is another thing. Again, if this is true, I'm focused on Hannibal Lecter."

Abigail looks like she's going to respond, but then her head turns, looking out past Beverly's small kitchenette, and she's gone.

She can't quite bring herself to get up from the table, knuckles rapping against cheap wood, head flooded with questionably true information, all flowing with what she already knew too easily. All from the not-ghost of Abigail Hobbs. Ridiculous. Against reason. Against probability, even.

She'd heard Zee complain about being second best to "Crawford's bloodhound". She saw him work everyday and he wasn't even close to second-rate, that's why he had his job, he could find the likely outcome based on the evidence – and yet Will could stand in a room and hear its hum, mind leaping to diabetes, skin-tone, golden tickets, understand the thorns of the dead.

His talent worked despite being irrational, and Jack took him on despite the risks that's landed him in the BSHCI. It was clearer than evidence, without fail. Had been, at least.

And now Abigail Hobbs is lying bare Dr. Lecter as what Will has been saying all this time. "Many more than your father."

One hell of a conundrum.

The next morning, Beverly slips out of her bed and into her morning clothes. Abigail is sitting at the table again, and she does not blink.

What she does do, once she's fixed her breakfast of cereal and an egg, is ask, "So you're real. And you're telling the truth – one of those. What do I do with it?"

Aside from her job. Maybe she's really asking, "Where does this crazy, impossible thing lead?"

Abigail just says, "You'll find him. You'll find me."

An hour later, she sets out, key digging into her palm, to talk to Will Graham.

The first thing she says to Abigail, in the days after it's all over, is "So, I found you."

"Yeah. You did," Abigail says, with one of her almost-smiles gracing her face. She looks pale. Scared. Still missing an ear, but good. At least what counts as good, considering.

It had taken time to nail the Chesapeake Ripper. Will, even having been right, was set on his own path regarding the man, and so was Jack. The scene at his house had been predictably chaotic. And there had been Abigail, burst out of a bedroom, taking Alana's gun and firing, her father's hand guiding her once last time.

After, Abigail had looked and looked at the body of the man who had made himself her second father, and Beverly had, on occasion, looked at her. She probably won't ever understand. For Abigail or Will.

If she hadn't been so slow to see.

But the two of them sit on Will's porch, watching Buster and Winston run around, Applesauce matching their stride. Beverly whispers, barely more than air, and maybe Abigail hears, "Gotcha."

At two P.M. on a Saturday Beverly walks into Abigail Hobbs' apartment, holding a modest fruit basket she bought at the bakery near the Starbucks. She'd googled what was a decent apartment-warming gift a few days ago, and every other option was too expensive or felt wrong. Too distant or too intimate.

Abigail smiles (slight but there) when she sees Beverly, and she looks good. Alive and well, with a flush to her cheeks and deep cerulean scarf draped around her neck. "Hey," she says, "Will was here earlier."

"Hey to you too. I got you this," Beverly replies, and holds up the fruit basket. Hopes it's not as bad of a gift as it suddenly feels. After all, she'd helped Abigail move in the week earlier.

Abigail takes it by the rim, thumb just missing the length of Beverly's pointer finger. "Thanks," she says, and lays it down by the counter. "I'll… definitely get use of it, yeah."

"Cool," Beverly says. "I like how you've decorated the place. Really natural with the blues and greens. Your art fits right in." On the walls are paintings of the sea and shore, of rocky peaks – infused with light and shadow, not grandiose, still rough even, but better than anything Beverly made in high school.

"I guess I didn't do too bad, with my budget."

"More than that, Abigail. Is that what you're looking into for college? Art school?"

"Maybe. Do you want to come sit down?" she says, looking at Beverly with a grin she's learned to recognize as sly.

Beverly laughs, makes a show of capitulation. "Alright."

It's sometime into their conversation of what it's like to feel the waves and current for the first time that Beverly notices the square watercolor hanging on the left hall. It's small – doesn't look like it even reaches a foot wide – but there's no mistaking the subject matter: a red-stained autumn forest, afternoon sunlight piercing every leaf the best it can.

Three years after the death of Hannibal Lecter, Beverly Katz wakes up from under her sheets and next to Abigail Hobbs. Abigail's already awake, though it doesn't look like she's been for long. She lets loose her breath when Beverly looks at her, expression pained but also hopeful, in a manner rare for the clever, hardy, wonderful woman she is.

Neither speaks of what she's been awoken of.

Instead, Abigail moves closer to her, eyes closing shut when Beverly slowly reaches out to rest her hand between clavicle and breast, palm warm and alive. After a while, Abigail reaches out to do the same. The two of them lie there, sun breaking through the curtains, each not quite understanding, but trusting, irrationally, it's enough, anyways.

Author's Notes. Originally posted 2022.01.23 for the Chocobox exchange, with ellipses at the front of the title.